Part 29

"I'll tell the lady doc to bounce out," said the bartender. "He's got 'em bad. I had 'em twict myself and took the cure. It's fierce. He's gotta have some dope--a shot o' hop will fix him."

The bartender hurried away on his kindly mission, while the Dago Duke clung to Van Lennop like a horrified child to its mother.

Dr. Harpe came quickly, her hair loose about her shoulders, looking younger and more girlish in a soft negligee than Van Lennop had ever seen her. She saw the faint shade of prejudice cross his face as she entered, but satisfaction was in her own. Her chance had come at last in this unexpected way.

"Snakes," she said laconically.

"Yes," Van Lennop replied with equal brevity.

"I'll have to quiet him. Will you stay with him?" She addressed Van Lennop.

"Certainly."

"Look here," protested the bartender in an injured voice. "He's my best friend and havin' had snakes myself----"

"Aw--clear out--all of you. We'll take care of him."

"Folks that has snakes likes their bes' friends around 'em," declared the bartender stubbornly. "They has influence----"

"Get out," reiterated Dr. Harpe curtly, and he finally went with the rest.

"I'll give him a hypodermic," she said when the room was cleared, and hastened back to her office for the needle.

Together they watched the morphine do its work and sat in silence while the wrecked and jangling nerves relaxed and sleep came to the unregenerate Dago Duke.

Dr. Harpe's impassive face gave no indication of the activity of her mind. Now that the opportunity to "square herself," to use her own words, had arrived, she had no notion of letting it pass.

"He seems in a bad way," Van Lennop said at last in a formal tone.

"It had to come--the clip he was going," she replied, seating herself on the edge of the bed and wiping the moisture from his forehead with the corner of the sheet.

The action was womanly, she herself looked softer, more womanly, than she had appeared to Van Lennop, yet he felt no relenting and wondered at himself.

She ended another silence by turning to him suddenly and asking with something of a child's blunt candor----

"You don't like me, do you?"

The awkward and unexpected question surprised him and he did not immediately reply. His first impulse was to answer with a bluntness equal to her own, but he checked it and said instead----

"One's first impressions are often lasting and you must admit, Dr. Harpe, that my first knowledge of you----"

"Was extremely unfavorable," she finished for him. "I know it." She laughed in embarrassment. "You thought, and still think, that I'm one of these medicine sharks--a regular money grabber."

Van Lennop replied dryly----

"I do not recollect ever having known another physician quite so keen about his fee."

She flushed, but went on determinedly--

"I know how it must have looked to you--I've thought of it a thousand times--but there were extenuating circumstances. I came here 'broke' with only a little black case of pills and a few bandages. My hotel bill was overdue and my little drug stock exhausted. I was 'up against it'--desperate--and I believed if that fellow got away I'd never see or hear of him again. I've had that experience and I was just in a position where I couldn't afford to take a chance. There isn't much practice here, it's a miserably healthful place, and necessity sometimes makes us seem sordid whether we are or not. I'd like your good opinion, Mr. Van Lennop. Won't you try and see my position from a more charitable point of view?"

He wanted to be fair to her, he intended to be just, and yet he found himself only able to say--

"I can't quite understand how you could find it in your heart even to hesitate in a case like that."